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Bolton Assaults Trump From the Right, and Takes Fire From All Directions
In an interview, the former national security said he accepted that he would pay a price for perhaps the most incriminating portrait of a president by such a high-level aide since the Watergate era.
He knew what he was getting into. He knew he would be showered with brickbats from the left for not speaking out sooner and denounced by the right for speaking out at all. He knew he would be thrashed by thunderous presidential tweets, and he knew he might even be dragged into court.
And yet John R. Bolton could not help himself. For decades, he has been the enfant terrible of the political right, speaking out in blunt and uncompromising terms even at the risk of offending some in his own party. That is what got him on Fox News. That is what got him speaking invitations. That is what made him a hero to conservatives who even urged him to run for president.
But after a lifetime in conservative politics, Mr. Bolton has now put himself in the cross hairs of just about everybody as he publishes a scorching tell-all memoir about his time as President Trump’s national security adviser in which he portrays the commander in chief as a walking, talking constitutional and national security disaster who knows little and cares little about anything other than himself. After seeing how it worked from the inside, Mr. Bolton knows he will pay a price.
“Look, I thought many times in the course of preparing this book that given the series of two-minute hates I was going to get from Trump himself that the whole thing wasn’t going to be worth it,” he conceded in an interview on Monday on the eve of the book’s publication. “But I just figured ultimately you’ve got to go through the hardships in order to get the facts out. I’m fully prepared for it. I’m not saying I’m going to enjoy it, but I understand the environment we’re in. I just think it’s important to tell the story.”
Not everyone accepts the get-the-facts-out explanation, seeing instead some mix of ambition, self-promotion, personal grievance and a reported $2 million book contract. Mr. Bolton is one subject on which Mr. Trump and Speaker Nancy Pelosi agree: He is in it for himself, not the country, cashing in rather than doing his duty and hardly to be celebrated as a public-spirited truth teller.
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